Assisted reproduction and assisted whiteness

Cross-border reproductive flows (or repro-flows) involve clients traveling across the world to fulfil their dreams of having a genetically related baby or a baby tailor-made to their expectations. Reproductive gametes and actors, eggs, egg providers, and gestational mothers (or surrogates), follow the flow to assist in this dream-making. In this chapter, based on a multi-sited ethnography, I use an intersection of feminist studies of raced reproduction and critical whiteness studies from the south to argue that the transnational matching of intended parents (IP) with gametes reproduces the hegemonic notions of white desirability. I highlight two such manifestations of racialised desires: Desire for racial matching (by some IP who identify as white) and desire for cosmopolitan and mixed whiteness (by some IP who do not identify as white) and demonstrate that both sets of desires, in effect, reaffirm the desirability of whiteness.